


Dirty Lies: die schmutzige Lüge von Wilhelm Wicki (or, Hugo Stiglitz is a Man of Infinite Patience).

by samskeyti



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:31:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samskeyti/pseuds/samskeyti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilhelm Wicki is a natural and glorious liar as well as a killer and Hugo Stiglitz values these things very highly indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirty Lies: die schmutzige Lüge von Wilhelm Wicki (or, Hugo Stiglitz is a Man of Infinite Patience).

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Secret Hanukkah 2009, for emcee_mana

  
At first they’re bitching, mostly. Taking aim at their comrades in their mother tongue feels comfortable, like their words are building them a haven in the surreal landscape they, under Aldo’s direction, are carving for themselves. Besides, Wilhelm Wicki is a natural and glorious liar as well as a killer, and Hugo Stiglitz values these things very highly indeed.

Kagan’s braying laughter gets Wicki started. “A good thing we’re in farm country,” he says and Hugo, who’s been playing with a stem of wild oats, sticks the green, sharp tasting piece between his teeth and chews theatrically. Wicki laughs and flops back on the ground, grass poking up around his head like a crown of feathers, and closes his eyes. His belly ripples with his laughter and when he cracks open his eyes, Hugo is watching and ready to screw up his face and chomp down on his oat stem and set Wicki off all over again.

\---

Hugo’s French is even more rudimentary than his English and Wicki’s – neglected since the 20s – is coming back, though his accent is too dreadful to use on anyone but his fellow basterds, who understand nothing and assume, not unwisely, the worst. Hugo can make out the odd phrase, sometimes only enough to be baffled, to wonder what in the hell he means by his creaky and guttural words that sound – though this could be Hugo’s longing filling the blanks for him – like a particularly intimate kind of abuse.

Watching Aldo is a favoured diversion for Hugo. He barely understands a word the man says at times, although his actions are straightforward – he has the kind of perversely honest manner that Hugo admires. Now he’s watching him in a small inn, somewhere found for them through an acquaintance made in the village, through a couple of words muttered across a shop counter in a slurred English that could be passed off as misheard French should the gaunt, dark-eyed youth serving them groceries and maybe more turn out to be mistaken. 

Aldo sits at the head of the table, his chair turned sideways and his face upturned and schoolboy eager as he regards the apparent owner-manager-waitress of the establishment. The woman is no slip of a girl, no Fräulein, rather she is a rich-voiced, voluptuous _Madame_. She wears clothes that look well-used, worn soft and shiny over the elbows and the arse but still finely cut. Perhaps she is a widow or like so many these days, as good as.

Stiglitz and Wicki sit and clean their plates, scraping up the last of something that tastes of rabbit and beans and onions and recalls winter nights spent inside as winds howled and threatened to pile snow across the door and Hugo’s Oma ladled more into her boys’ plates – and shit, it’s a surprise to be thinking on her, dead since he was fourteen and blessed be, she never lived to see this; she’d have been scathing on the subject of Hugo’s indiscretions but he thinks in the end she’d understand. He wipes his plate once more with the last of his bread and turns his attention back to present company.

Wicki has set down his spoon to watch Aldo and his laughter bursts Hugo’s bubble of reminiscing. Lt. Raine has begun to flirt in earnest, inviting her to sit beside him then edging closer, his grin as widely good-natured as his shaggy-dog accent. Wicki begins a translation of her replies, her halting English and the rapid French she employs to have Raine dancing like a charmed cobra, his big, bluff head nodding side to side. Wicki snorts with laughter then gives himself over to a coughing fit when Aldo slathers a French accent over his American as if to make himself understood. The back of Hugo’s tunic is bunched in his fist and his voice is hot against his ear as he says, “Damn, he’d like to bend her over that bar and get started right now.” 

And Wilhelm Wicki is nothing if not specific when he relates the contents of their CO’s mind, blow by blow, as it were. Hugo takes a sudden and urgent interest in his napkin. You see, Wilhelm Wicki making shit up about Raine bending their hostess over the table and pushing his big hands under her skirts, lingering on her thighs which, in the fashion of necessity are bare, well it catches Hugo unaware and he feels, unaccountably – after all, it isn’t _him_ – he feels the tips of his ears growing hot and conspicuous.

When abruptly, under cover of Donowitz climbing on a table with a tankard of beer, the pair of them slip through the door to the stairs, Wicki falls silent. Hugo looks from the still swinging door to Wicki’s face, with his dark eyes shining above his wolf-grin and Wicki tips his head to the side and says, “And then…”

Hugo thumps him in the shoulder, harder than he strictly needs to and Wilhelm Wicki positively smirks.

\---

He remembers seeing Wicki. And why him in the gaggle of Jewish Americans who busted him out of jail, in the gang of scrawny, joyous boys with their eyes full of cartoons who burst round the corner to stand outside his cell, boys who Hugo wanted to cuff over the ears with a loose fist and hug? Aldo was the one who made him the offer he wouldn’t refuse, but it wasn’t really him, either. It was the quieter one, the taciturn, stiffer one, not a boy, hanging at the rear who was the one. He killed quietly, without the splatter and urchin swagger of the kids, and with a technician’s finesse, sliding behind the guard, smooth as a mime or a dancer, finding a notch for his blade in the gloom. Hugo liked the way he handled a knife. Not showy, but to the discerning eye, his hands were fucking poetry.

\---

Wilhelm Wicki is lying in the grass again, with his legs sprawled so that one boot touches Hugo’s calf and his jacket unbuttoned. He might be asleep, but Hugo doubts it. He closes his own eyes and twists a handful of leaves until they tear.

The boy at the lake house had been skinny and golden-haired and Hugo’s hands – already larger and coarser than he’d wish – fit above the other boy’s hips exactly. Hugo remembers the grass particularly. The grass they were lying side by side in, the blades that threaded through the blond boy’s hair when Hugo rolled them, the helpless little smile on his lips before Hugo slid them both out of their swimming trunks. The way his companion’s mouth fell into an open gasp, round and wet and it stayed in the shape of that sound as they thrust at each other, the boy’s eyes fluttering shut as Hugo fought to keep his open, the magistrate’s son’s body shivering and hot against him and Hugo couldn’t do anything but fall onto his mouth with a sound he hadn’t known he could make, half growl and half whine. For a few seconds their tongues slid over one another, while D’s hands still gripped Hugo’s arse.

He had a fine-boned, sharp-knuckled fist. Hugo can still feel it, the back of his head hitting the dirt, the sun blazing through his eyelids and his blood, warm and watery in his mouth.

\---

A hand is waving before his eyes, blotting out the grey sky. The nails are bitten down and filthy and the skin is stained, blood turning to black in the creases.

He blinks, focuses on these hands that are broad and calloused and moving unhurriedly and open overhead. From above him, Wicki says, “Well. Well, you’re back.”

\---

“Now, Omar,” Wicki says, “Omar, I can’t imagine fucking a woman at all.”

Hugo looks at him blankly, looks at the moonlit humps of men trying to get some shut-eye, can’t make out Omar Ulmer and whatever he’s done to get Wicki’s attention so he looks back at Wicki, lifting an eyebrow in the question he knows he’s expected to ask.

“Hips.” Wicki rolls his eyes and traces a generous hourglass shape with the sides of his hands.

Hugo rolls his eyes right back and says, “Sure. Sure he would. And you’d watch him.” 

They smirk at each other until Wicki says, mildly, “Perhaps.”  Then he’s looking over their comrades again, in search of fresh targets.

“Or Aldo,” Wicki nods at the most centrally, comfortably placed mound and murmurs, “You’d do anything for him?”

Hugo says, not quite focussing on Wicki’s face through his lashes, “If he ordered me, yes.”  He looked up, straight into his eyes for a moment before he looked down again. “Yes, I would.”

Wicki doesn’t talk into the silence, so Hugo nods over to where Utivich sits against a tree trunk, knees drawn up to his chest and his pistol laid across them and says, “ But he – he’d go to his knees for you.”

And Wicki – Hugo doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it sure as the devil wasn’t for Wilhelm Wicki to duck his head and smother a smile. Hugo stares at him, speechless, until Wilhelm shrugs and looks off into the distance. Hugo regards the horizon with him, feeling oddly numb and inert, as if he could sit here, a lump without a thought in his head til sun-up, unaware of Wicki leaning steadily, dangerously towards him. He part bumps, part falls on Hugo’s shoulder and his weight takes Hugo down. He hasn’t the motivation to wrestle him off, the arsehole, so he lets him lie against him, shaking with silent laughter until it – like an infection or an earthquake – sets him shaking too, and there is nothing to do then but curl towards him and chuckle against his neck.

\---

Hirschberg is clumsy, that’s no secret and his hair-trigger is so renowned that the basterds make sure not to stand in front of him when arms are drawn. However, by Wicki’s logic, that makes it obvious – self-evident, naturally – that he’s a two-pump chump as well. Hugo snorts and pulls on the rat-chewed blanket they’ve slung around themselves in their ditch.

“And even then,” Wicki pulls back on his corner of the blanket, wraps himself closer to Hugo so his whisper becomes a roar in his ear. “Even then, I know he got the wrong hole once or twice; accidentally, you know,” and Hugo grins into his fold of blanket in spite of himself.

Wicki continues, low-pitched and carrying, Hugo’s sure, the way the rumble of a distant train can fill a valley. “He liked it, not just a little.”

The brush of a finger along his neck raises any hairs Wicki’s voice didn’t already have trembling and Hugo lies still, as if a column of Wehrmacht were marching past their hollow. He keeps his stillness and his guard up until Wicki shifts his finger and speaks again, his breath following his touch along Hugo’s hairline. “Accidentally, you know.”

It’s clumsy, all knees and boots and noses, but he manages to turn in his arms and he says, with his lips pressed against the scrub of stubble on Wicki’s jaw but his words distinct and unmistakable, “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

\---

Hugo sits in the twilight and smokes a bitter thing he cribbed together from salvaged butts, sending the smoke out the side of his mouth in a flattened stream as he flicks his gaze between Wicki and Donowitz.

Wicki’s almost reassembled his gun, the remaining parts set out on a piece of sacking, grease and powder traces all over his hands. His fingers will smell like gunmetal for the rest of the day, will taste of it.

Hugo takes a harsh drag on his smoke and looks at Donny, several yards away with Utivich, scraping a scurf of Nazi remnants from his bat. His head is bent in concentration, as if he could identify the traces, as if he were matching each scrap to a terrified face in his mind.

Wicki starts with his voice pitched low and musical as if he’s spinning yarns in the glow of a campfire or starting a bedtime tale. Donny has no German to speak of, but they keep quiet enough for him not to really hear while he attends to his bat. The warm slide of Wicki’s storytelling voice makes Hugo think, this evening, the better part of Wicki’s respect will be paid to the bat.

“He carves the names as he kills them, you know that, Hugo?”  His voice brings back cold nights, deeds done long ago in forests, eiderdowns and hot drinks and boyish terror curdling deliciously in his belly.

Hugo says, with due scepticism, “ Those names are Jews. Jewesses.”

“Yes, he’s not the only one who kills people who piss him off.” Wicki steals the cigarette from Hugo’s mouth, puffing once and replacing it. “It’s usual to start close to home.” Hugo frowns.

His poker face cracks into a grin. “You believe too easily.”

Hugo’s frown deepens. “I didn’t.”

Wicki snatches the cigarette again. “Really. It could be true, though. It wasn’t…” Wicki makes a gesture at his gun, a slicing of the air with his hand. “It wasn’t close to home, personal? The first time?”

Hugo flushes, warm with an anger he’s forgotten. There’re several things he’d forgotten how to feel, until he met Wicki. He stifles the urge to grab at his collar. “No.” He blows smoke and scowls at Wicki’s grin. “No. It’s just killing. It’s necessary.” Wicki’s grin fades and he looks watchful, close to pensive. Hugo narrows his eyes. “How was it for you?”

Wicki spits and his eyes turn dark and dangerous. “I hated him. I was glad to kill him.” He unsheathes his knife and drives it into the ground, slow and deliberate until it stands up by itself. “My home – I have cousins, my Aunt Rivka, deported. My uncle, shot. Classmates, kids I played football with in the street, friends. Some of them…” He stares at his knife, pushes the handle with one finger until it stands completely straight.

“Some of them, I forget their names, but their faces –” He takes the cigarette Hugo holds out to him. “They’re likely –” He smokes then breathes out slowly and when he speaks again his voice is soft, almost gentle. “… murdered . And I can never know. I can never find out, because…” They pass the cigarette once more, back and forth, between them. “I have no home now.”

Enough light has faded that they can’t see their comrades. They’re sitting in silence, the kind of silence where, if a breeze passed they could hear every leaf shivering against its neighbour. They’re alone, so clearly alone.

“I hated them,” says Wicki. “The first and the second. That sniper today.” He throws Hugo a lightning, angled grin. “The prison guard.”

Hugo nods, gives him a slim little smile in return.

“Ja, alles,” Wicki says and looks at Hugo with a hint of a question in his eyes, not so much curiosity as an understanding and Hugo says, “Ich auch. It was something like that.” He’s glad dusk has fallen when his cheeks flush a deep and unstoppable red.

\---

Hicox removes himself from the doorway and heads back over to Aldo. Hugo tries this new English word out for size, shifting it around on his tongue like it’s inedible, a prune pit of a word. Loquacious. He gets in a single stroke of knife to leather before Wicki appears at the door, his expression murderous.

He at least remembers to lower his voice this time. It’s a new irritant, one of the many ways the Lieutenant’s presence makes Wicki frown. Lately he’ll start to speak then stop and flinch and start to mutter furtively, almost shyly – or worse, not say anything at all – and Hugo harboured no ill-feeling for the Tommy, not to begin with, but watching Wicki feels like something, and he’ll call it Archie fucking Hicox for want of another name, like something’s rubbing under his skin, scraping at a raw part under the surface and it’s fresh and searing every time.

 “A fucking _actress_. A basement! And he has no idea, he’s a naïf, he’s gonna get somebody killed. He _is_.” His eyes are the kind of endless dark Donny’s get. “Arsehole. And…” He gestures wildly at Hugo. “How dare he.”

Hugo smiles at Wicki, small and wry, with a shrug of one shoulder. “I, at least, am calm.”

Wicki flings his hands up again. “Oh, _you._”

“Hmmm,’ says Hugo. He runs his blade down the strop.

Wicki looks over his shoulder, catches Aldo’s eye and Raine, for some reason Hugo can’t quite figure, nods. Then Wilhelm Wicki kicks the door shut. 

 ---


End file.
